Kids Cooking Club: Meilani celebrates her birthday in the kitchen

Saturday we started the celebration of Meilani's 2nd Birthday a little early by making our Cooking Club a Kids Birthday Party theme. We let all the kids tie on aprons and we devised a menu with kids in mind. We served White Bean Dip with Veggie Sticks, Cut-out Fruit Skewers, Personal Bagel Pizzas and Bug Chocolate cupcakes.
We started out our time together by mixing up some Flubber. What's Flubber? It's a fun, gooey, sometimes sticky, sometimes smooth. It's like silly putty meets play-doh. Our friend, Cori, shared a homemade recipe and Danna led the kids in mixing it up. The fun thing about flubber is you can roll it out like cookie dough or squish it up and store it in a little plastic container.

Juliahna helped us with the Corn Starch and water creation. Pour a box of corn starch in a tub and add water. Watch the mixture morp into sometimes liquid and sometimes solid. Think about what it feels like to stick your fingers in wet sand. The greatest part is it dries like powder and it's all easy to clean up!

Our friend, Caleb Smith, helped out with cutting the watermelon slices into fun shapes. We used cookie cutters to do the shapes, then put them on popsicles sticks with grapes like fruit skewers (minus the pointy edge).

While the kids played with gooey, gross stuff, the mamas made personal bagel pizzas with all kinds of toppings. These are an easy and fun way to please a variety of eaters. They are a fun recipe for a party or just a picnic lunch during the week.

One of our growing kid members, Corban Pusey, lounged on our patio and tried out the fruit skewers with his mama. He dug all the kid food we served. What a life! The day was steaming hot so the kids went for a dip in the pool with the daddies.

Our dessert was a new recipe for Chocolate Cupcakes with low sugar from our BABY BISTRO cookbook. Then we made a cream cheese frosting sweetened with pomegranate jelly and topped the cakes with organic sprinkles and chocolate chips to make them look like lady bugs. We sang the Happy Birthday song to Meilani and she blew out her candles.

Our youngest Cooking Club member, Olivia Andrade, even came to help Meilani celebrate. Her Mama and Daddy brought Meilani a cool sandbox toy to celebrate the big 2!
Meilani got a few homemade gifts too, including an apron by Allison and this fleece blanket made by Paula and Juliahna. Meilani curled up under the blankie right away and snuggled with her new stuffed bunny.

Meilani also loved her giant Winnie the Pooh coloring book from Caleb and Joshua Smith. She got right to work coloring *every* page. It's amazing how the simple things can be so much fun! Cooking with friends made our Saturday full once again. Next Saturday: the pool party!